Approaches to career success: An exploration of surreptitious career-success strategies

Harris, Lloyd C. and Ogbonna, Emmanuel Okechukwu ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9742-1535 2006. Approaches to career success: An exploration of surreptitious career-success strategies. Human Resource Management 45 (1) , pp. 43-66. 10.1002/hrm.20095

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Abstract

Theorists have forwarded a vast range of career-success determinants, including sociodemographic, social capital, personality, and other behavioral factors. We suggest that existing studies have overconcentrated on the overt behavioral determinants of career success to the detriment of the covert, clandestine, and concealed. Our analysis of two detailed qualitative case studies involving 112 indepth interviews with executives, managers, supervisors, and front-line staff in a large financial services organization and a medium-sized fashionable restaurant group uncovered five main strategies of surreptitious career success.These strategies are obligation creation and exploitation, personal-status enhancement, information acquisition and control, similarity exploitation, and proactive vertical alignment. Our findings indicate that just over 79% of those interviewed (88 of 112) referred to, at some point in their careers, premeditated strategies to enhance their careers that they concealed from coworkers. Consequently, we argue that surreptitious actions are central to employee career-focused activities and fundamental to a more complete understanding of the complexities of career-oriented employee behavior.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Business (Including Economics)
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor H Social Sciences > HD Industries. Land use. Labor > HD28 Management. Industrial Management
Publisher:	Wiley-Blackwell
ISSN:	0090-4848
Related URLs:	http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.10...
Last Modified:	21 Oct 2022 10:00
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/38651

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